Work Text:
There’s been a quiet in the penthouse for six days. It’s a stubborn, suffocating silence. Bruce had gone two months without speaking once, when he was ten years old and it felt like there’d never be a reason to speak again. He’d often wondered if he would ever last that long again as an adult, or if he'd even notice without someone there to tell him he’d done it. This, these six days, was the closest he’d come.
Alfred breaks the silence on the seventh day, as he usually does, like a biblical thing willing speech into creation (though strictly speaking, today their mouths should have rested). “You should clean yourself up,” he says, as close to a sneer as he’ll allow himself. “You stink.” The tt of the word is crisp and sharp.
There’s black on Bruce’s hands, on his arms, on his face and neck. It might reach under his shirt and down his chest, he wouldn’t know. It’s been over a week since he’s been naked enough to notice such things. He notices now the swell of annoyance within him at the reprimand.
“I like how I smell,” is all he says, and he purposely lets his blackened hand brush against pressed white shirt sleeves as he passes Alfred towards the stairs in his first trip up them in a week.
Alfred hadn’t minded the smell a few weeks ago. Weeks and weeks ago. When Bruce was buzzing, fresh from patrol, and so pleased with himself at another case successfully put to bed. And Alfred had noticed and shared in his pride as he pushed him against the workbench, got on his knees for him, and opened Batman’s trousers that were rank and humid from a long night to reward him for a job well done. Bruce had cradled the back of his head, holding him close, so all Alfred could breathe and drink was him, and had marvelled at how soft his hair felt under his soiled, brutal fingers.
Bruce thinks about it in the shower, forearm pressed against the cold tiles, head hanging, as he fucks his own fist, imagining it was a warm wet mouth he was filling instead. That, he thinks, as he splatters the tiles with come, would shut him up.
The argument hadn’t been about anything important. Bruce doesn’t even really remember what it was about any more. But they only ever really argue about one thing—the Batman. All routes lead to this. And it’ll never truly be resolved until it is, but then only one of them will be left with no one else to argue with, so it really was a moot point.
For some reason, Alfred just can’t accept this. So they argue.
They were perfectly suited for arguing with each other, as Alfred got loud when Bruce got quiet, and neither of them could stand to be wrong. They knew what buttons to press with each other so well by now, they read them like braille. Even when they were getting on well, they knew this one constant point of contention was just waiting to be picked up again sometime down the line.
Bruce sometimes thinks—to himself and no one else because he’d only have Alfred to tell and he’d never tell him this—that it makes their sex better. When they’re both in that state, it's more a mutual devouring than sex; the fervid consumption of each other.
Sometimes he’ll deliberately provoke Alfred, just a little, and sometimes a little more. Alfred comes inside more often when he’s angry—he usually refrains, not for any other reason other than he knows Bruce is more likely to roll over and sleep rather than bother to clean himself up afterwards. And he’ll hold Bruce down a little firmer and a little meaner in that you will take it way that Bruce likes, but Alfred normally thinks is too presumptuous without it being requested. And he’s extraordinarily tender afterwards, kissing bruises that had been left like it’ll remove them, and whispering devotion into his neck as though Bruce needs a reminder of it. Perhaps it’s that part Bruce likes best of all.
It's later on that seventh day that Alfred comes down to the cave with no real purpose, but Bruce can tell he’s trying to think of one even as he walks towards him. It’s been the full week since he’s been down here, and even Bruce can admit it's a little grim now. This is the topic Alfred settles on.
“Could do with a little sprucing up down here.” Alfred has a quirk of filling silences with statements open for Bruce to comment on, but where a reply isn’t required. It was probably developed from years of getting no reply to actual questions.
He gets no reply to this.
Alfred picks up the empty wrapper of a protein bar Bruce had got some time in the week to have in place of a meal. He looks at it with no small amount of disgust. “So this is what you’ve been living off. While your actual food goes to waste upstairs.”
“I was working.”
“Most people find the time to work and consume actual food.”
“Most people’s work isn’t as important as this.”
Alfred actually scoffs at this, derisive and belittling, and annoyance crawls over Bruce’s skin. He turns to glare at him, and he thinks he might hate him just a little, even as he aches for him.
No, he doesn’t hate him. He hates that Alfred cannot let this one thing go, accept it and let things be easy, when he lets Bruce get away with nearly everything else. But then he wouldn’t be Alfred if he did. He’d be someone else entirely, and Bruce had never been able to love anyone else, so he might not love an Alfred who gives in on this.
“If you come up now,” Alfred says, the scorn surgically removed from his voice, “I’ll make you something fresh and hot.”
This is how most of their arguments are resolved; Alfred offering something that cannot be resisted, as all things from him are near irresistible. It is usually immediate, hours later not days, when tempers have cooled. Bruce must have said something truly terrible this time. He doesn’t remember what. Days with their endless repetition bleed into each other. If not for his journals, Batman’s life might be as smeared and diluted as Bruce’s.
Alfred must have been waiting all these days to see if Bruce would apologise for whatever was said. He’s here now, extending the perpetual olive branch because he realised Bruce never would. That thought sends a flare of something awful and acidic through him.
“I’m not hungry,” he mutters, turning back to his computer screen.
“Of course you are.” Alfred stands there watching him, hip cocked with the weight of his right side resting heavily on his cane. “It won’t take long.”
The dismissal of Bruce’s statement adds to his rising resentment. “I said I wasn’t.” Alfred sets his shoulders. Bruce waits for a rebuttal, for the argument to continue, but he just deflates, then sets about clearing the clutter from the workbench that had amassed—picking another battle. There is a certain amount of shame as Bruce watches him dump litter into the trash can that’s easily within reach under the desktop.
“Stop it.” Bruce’s hand is around Alfred’s wrist, halting him, before he’s really aware he wanted the action to take place. He looms over him, right hand to right wrist, Alfred’s arm crossed in a barricade between them. It’s still the closest they’ve been in days. The trim of Alfred’s undercut and beard is fresh and blunt, well maintained, while Bruce has been mouldering alone down here.
Alfred meets his eye levelly, utterly unperturbed. “If I don't, it won't get done.” He’s right, and that incenses Bruce further. He’s so reliant on him in so many ways. Completely dependent on the things he gives him, the care he provides, his unconditional love in its unlimited supply. If he wasn’t touching Alfred’s wrist now, the bones grinding together under his vice-like grip, he might never feel the warmth of another person. Without Alfred, he'd be unaware he'd even want to.
“Leave it alone.”
“I’m just working, same as you,” Alfred says, defiance and daring in the raised jut of his jaw. Bruce looks at his mouth. That building something inside of him boils over, scalding and urgent. He yanks Alfred’s arm, jerking him around to slam him up against the workbench, the hard line of it digging unforgivingly into his hips where Bruce holds him, body to body, chest to back. There’s a roar of blood in Bruce’s ears, deafening and turbulent. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, what he wants. He wants Alfred. He wants him and wants him.
“What now?” Alfred asks, breathless and baiting. He presses back against Bruce’s hold, but with no intent of breaking it. “You gonna do it?”
Bruce realises then what this is. How he’s hard against Alfred’s lower back and probably has been since he first touched him. How he wants to hold Alfred down and not let him go.
“Or,” Alfred continues, “do you need me to do that too?”
The provocation does its job. Bruce snarls and forces Alfred down with little care at being gentle, chest slamming onto the worktop, and plasters himself over his back, burrowing into him. He wants to crawl inside him and take root, like a parasite or a virus, some sub-thing that needs another, more living life to cling to in order to survive.
Alfred is blood-warm against him, in his arms where he’s caged him. Alive and firm; a perfect host. He smells clean and good and comforting, though that’s not what Bruce wants him to be right now. He puts his mouth against his neck, right above his shirt collar, and breathes him in deeper. That smell has made him hard since he was a teenager. He bites down, giving into an overwhelming urge to have a piece of him between his teeth, and Alfred grunts like he’d touched his cock.
“Stay,” Bruce says, as you would to a dog and Alfred obeys, as a dog would. Bruce levers himself up. Alfred has his fists clenched beside him, forearms straining with tension, but still he makes no move to leave, to stop this. He’s breathing heavily, just as Bruce is.
This is not a position Bruce has been in before. He had thought he’d seen Alfred from every possible angle; staffer, father, teacher, mother, lover. But this, looking down at him beneath him, is new. Uncategorized. It startles him how much he likes it.
He’s reminded, a little, of all those hours they spent training together, grappling on mats, Alfred instructing him where to put his hands on him to gain a better hold. It had been years before Bruce had been able to pin him and keep him there. He’d been hard the first time he’d done it then too.
Bruce can’t help himself; he grinds against him, circular and fierce, hips aimed slightly upwards. Alfred tries to move back into him too, but Bruce doesn’t want that and holds him down, hand at the centre of his back, keeping him still. He’s rubbing himself raw against the cold metallic zipper of his jeans, but he can’t bring himself to stop to make it better. These long days with their absence of Alfred’s touch had left him ravenous, starved.
His gaze is fixated on Alfred’s narrowest point, the dip of his waist that his waistcoat accentuates and where Bruce’s eyes are perpetually drawn. That sloping arch of him that extends upwards into a broad chest and shoulders and downwards to a sharp curve. It’s erotic in a way Bruce thinks was designed solely for him, in that arrogant way he thinks all of Alfred was made for him. Made to please him endlessly.
“Gonna stick it in you,” he grunts out in his mumbling grimace of a monotone, mouth running unchecked. “Gonna fuck myself inside you.”
“What are you waiting for, then?” Alfred’s irritation is only outmatched by his impatience. He turns his head, just enough to catch a glimpse of Bruce behind him. “Do it if you're to do it.”
The bluntness wounds Bruce a little, a ridiculous thing as his own bluntness is holding Alfred forcefully down beneath him. He had imagined, perhaps, Alfred begging for it, as desperate as he is, though the thought only now occurs as he doesn't receive it.
It incentivises, makes it seem like he has something to prove in his ability and worth. His cock is still virginal, after all. Untested and unproven. The ways in which Bruce is lacking are numerous, and this cannot be one of them.
It is with a hurried fervour that Bruce strips himself from the waist down and yanks Alfred’s trousers from him. Perfunctory at best, careless at worst. Several of Alfred’s buttons rip when he tears them open. He makes an annoyed noise of protest, but nothing more.
Bruce spits on him, loud and vulgar, down into the valley of him, and rubs his cock there, making them both wet. He spits again onto his own cock—something satisfying in the use of bodily fluids, something primal and base. He smears the spit in with his thumb then holds the flat length of it over his cock to keep it slotted in Alfred’s cleft, gripping and palming his flesh possessively with his other hand. There, he ruts.
Over his own harsh, unsteady breathing he can hear Alfred muttering a repetition of come on, come on, urging him with an uncharacteristic impatience. His hips are moving too, though only in aborted little jerks as though he’s trying to refrain, but only barely.
His need bleeds into Bruce’s, adding to it, distorting it beyond reason.
Through the squalid disorder of the bench’s drawers, Bruce hurriedly retrieves a tub of lotion, given to him in the hopes it’d be used on his cracked, dry knuckles, but that’s rarely what it’s used for. Thick and viscous, he scoops some out on his fingers and is far too eager as he parts Alfred to press two unceremoniously inside.
Alfred sucks an audible breath in through his teeth at the sudden invasion, going instantly still. Bruce knows he should adopt more gentleness and restraint, but there is a strange disconnect between doing the act and being on the receiving end. A detachment. He cannot remember how it feels to have fingers breaching him, or any discomfort the act may produce, not when he’s hungrily watching how his own sink into Alfred and feeling that soft, impossible tightness around him. He pulls nearly completely free, then pushes in again, watching with a rapt attention at how he is prising him open. He feels all at once denied that he has never done this before. There are so few intimacies left between them that they haven't already shared.
“You’re tight,” he breathes. He palms his own cock absently as he watches his fingers fuck in and out of him. “So tight just for me.”
A choked laugh comes from Alfred, and Bruce frowns, wondering what’s so funny but refusing to ask. He pushes in deeper to the final knuckle without tenderness, and is satisfied when Alfred doesn’t laugh again.
When his own impatience wins out against competency, he pulls his fingers free and wipes them absently on the t-shirt he’s still wearing. He spits on his cock again instead of bothering with more lotion. He’s too on edge to dare touch himself enough to spread it. Lets it drip off him as he lines himself up with unsteady hands.
“I’m gonna do it,” he announces to the vast terminal, giving the act far more ceremony than it deserves. His heart is pounding, from nerves and want. He presses in. His cock head slips, sliding in the sloppily applied slickness. His face tingles hotly. A noise of frustration escapes him. He adjusts his grip, shuffles closer, and pushes in again. Something gives and he’s inside.
The world narrows to where they are joined and everything is warm, soft, and perfect. If he was tight around his fingers, it's nothing like this. Bruce’s molars grind together, stomach muscles jumping, as he wills himself to remain still, more for his own benefit than for Alfred’s. He can’t come just from putting it in. He can’t.
His eyes are glued to where he’s stretching Alfred open. Where his body is accommodating Bruce’s presence. He commits the sight to memory, alongside how his cock looks in Alfred’s mouth.
“Christ, Bruce.” Bruce glances up. Alfred’s up on elbows, shoulders hunched, head tipped back. The dip of him even more pronounced. All of him taut as a wire. Bruce wants to see his face. See the effect this is having on him. He daren’t move.
Restraint lasts for an extended, strained moment, before his hips are jerking forwards involuntarily, forcing himself deeper and deeper. He’s all the way inside now. Fully sheathed. He’s dimly aware he should have taken things slower, but it’s too late for that. Too late by far.
He drags back, both hands like a vice on Alfred’s hips, watching how his cock leaves him wet and shining, then pushes in again, right to the hilt. They both groan, low, deep, and rattling.
Bruce falls forwards, catching himself on one hand on the desktop, hips pressed flushed to Alfred’s cheeks, balls snug against the very tops of his thighs. So many points of connection between them. So many sensations clamouring for attention. He leans in to press his face into Alfred’s shoulder, breathes deep. Leaves wet, open-mouthed kisses there, at any part of him he could reach. Licks him. Tasting. Taking more and more.
“I’m inside you.” Bruce doesn’t recognize the voice that speaks. It’s high and strange. “I’m in you. Inside Alfred.”
There’s a whining sound coming from somewhere. It takes a delayed few seconds to understand it’s coming from him.
Then there’s a hand on his wrist, an anchor point. “Take a moment. Take a breath.” Bruce blinks and the words slowly perforate through the haze. He draws in a shallow breath and lets it go. Then another. The immediacy recedes a little, dulls. He blinks again and things seem sharper.
“That’s it.” Alfred’s voice is soothing, calming. Even like this, their ingrained dynamic—the give and the take—remains the same. “More in control?”
Bruce presses his forehead against him, nodding. “Yeah.”
“Good.” Alfred turns his head, bumps his temple against Bruce’s jaw. “Now fuck me.”
The order simplifies everything. There was a task to complete; fuck Alfred, make it good. He does as he’s told. Rolls his hips, finds a rhythm, sticks to it. It’s not gentle. It couldn’t be, not at this point. Has to be hard, has to feel like each thrust is forcing them closer and closer together. Fusing them to make up for the week apart.
One hand grips Alfred’s shoulder, the other at his waist, as Bruce hammers into him, pulling him back as he drives forward. He’s never been more aware of the sound of flesh on flesh. Their connection echoes around the cave, bouncing off the walls and served back to them. It pierces straight through him, right into his gut.
Bruce wants to tune himself out, the desperate whines and grunts that he can’t contain, but they bleed in. He sounds like he’s the one getting fucked, the one being taken apart. In a way, he is. He listens out for Alfred instead; he was never loud when they were together, but he can hear him now, hear his soft gasps, his pleased little groans that he’s drawing out of him. Bruce savours them, hoards them. They sound like approval.
When was the last time someone did this to you, he wants to ask. Who was here before me? Was there ever anyone else? He would hate whatever answer he’d be given—Bruce's own list begins and will end with Alfred. Instead, he just tries to make him forget any name but his own.
Rapidly it turns inelegant, frantic. Bruce drops his hands to the desktop, using the force of his entire body to fuck into him, hips working fast and graceless. Sweat runs into his eyes, down his temples, his neck, gathering at his pits. He blinks it away, and it runs down his cheeks. Just sweat, nothing else.
“‘M close,” he grunts out. “Wanna come inside. Lemme do it inside.”
“Just a little bit longer, baby. Hold out a little more.” Bruce whimpers but obeys, the raging pressure that is building only kept at bay by Alfred’s instruction.
Alfred levers himself up a little higher, gets a hand under him. Bruce watches with a dazed fascination, heat curling tight inside him, at the frantic motion of his arm as Alfred begins to work himself. Not being able to see the act itself makes it more arousing somehow. The gaps fill in themselves.
Their tempos are out of sync. Bruce slows—a forceful halting of his needy hips that takes a great effort—still watching Alfred’s movements with a glazed intensity, then begins up again fucking him at the pace Alfred sets. It could be Alfred’s hand on him, moving him instead.
It is immensely gratifying, the harmony of their bodies.
“Is it good?” he asks, desperation-tinged and gasping. “Tell me it's good.”
“Yeah, it's good. You're so good, Bruce. My good boy. Fucking me so good.”
Bruce lets out a choked little sob, pleasure searing potent and urgent in his belly. He wraps an arm around Alfred’s chest, plasters himself against him, holds him tight. His thrusts devolve completely into senseless rutting—short, quick and buried—chasing his release.
“Can I come now?” He’s drooling wet onto Alfred’s collar, panting so hard, face twisted open in pained ecstasy. “Please let me do it, please, please, please.”
“Do it, come on. Give it to me.”
Then it’s like a perilously thin band within Bruce, that was held together only by something of Alfred’s, snaps. His hips buck, stilted and rigid, once, twice then again. And he comes, face buried into Alfred’s neck. Not deep enough to hide his pitiful, extended whine.
He’s still feeling it, still lost deep within it, when Alfred clenches around him, insides pulsing along with his own release. Bruce can only grunt at the feeling of overstimulation that goes beyond tolerance, his spent cock milked, wrung out. He is not willing to be separated yet to lessen it. If it's an endurance, it's a welcome one.
The silence in the wake of it is dazed and thick. A continuation of the one they’d shared all week. Only their laboured breathing perforates it.
"Freezing in here," Alfred says after a time. He taps Bruce’s hip; a clear sign to disengage. He does so begrudgingly.
When he pulls out, they both suck in a breath.
He has left him slightly gaping and wet. Bruce has never witnessed this end of proceedings before. He reaches out to hold him open, to watch his own spend leak out of him, but Alfred swats his hand away as he straightens.
“If you’re going to do that again,” he says, stooping to fix his clothes, “give me a little warning first.” It’s a reprimand, but a gentle one. It contains none of the harshness that had been volleyed between them in recent days.
An apology is primed on Bruce’s lips, but he can’t voice it. He nods his head, kowtowed.
“But that isn’t to say,” Alfred adds, his lips quirked a little, “that I didn’t enjoy it.”
Bruce nods again, unsure of what to say. He puts his finger in the torn hole in Alfred’s trousers where a button had been. A vague guilt is dripping into the pleasant numbness the afterglow had enveloped him in.
"Never mind that." Alfred lifts Bruce’s chin to meet his smile. There isn’t anything in it but affection. Bruce stares for a long time to make sure.
Alfred pats his cheek, then reaches down to pull up Bruce’s jeans and briefs, pausing only to wipe his wet cock clean with a discarded cloth from the workbench. The considerate little gesture makes Bruce feel warm.
"Now, if you’re finished, let's get some proper food in you. I trust that worked you up an appetite." Bruce wants to blush, but he’s still not put together enough for it yet. He needs Alfred to reassemble the remaining pieces first.
He lets himself be led out the terminal without complaint. In the elevator ride up towards the penthouse, he takes Alfred’s hand in his own and interlaces their fingers. Alfred squeezes back.
The slate was clean again; the perennial argument abandoned, put on pause until something else picks at it and reopens the wound again. Bruce will make a pointed effort to ensure that’s not for a long while.